Scarf*oo

The People at RNIB have released the Surf Right Toolbar, which is — you guessed it — a toolbar for IE, which is designed to bring to the surface the often hidden accessibilty settings, such as turning javascript and images on/off, changing text size and so on.

Quoting:
“The Surf Right Toolbar is really for anyone who wants to adjust the way they view content on the web to make it easier to read. This could include people with mild disabilities, the elderly, people with reading problems, cognitive problems, using dial-up, photosensitivity and so on.”

You can grab the beta, right here.

“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.”
– Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager Internet Explorer

So the flames have extinguished? Read more on the subject.

Sooner than later we may be dropped into a world of version targeting and forward compatibility, when it comes to web development. The basic idea is to use a meta declaration to specify which browsers and versions our web page intends to support. For example, writing:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7;FF=2" />

… would say that our page was tested and works on IE version 7 and Firefox version 2, for example.

Now, the problem I see here is in actual browser support for backwards-compatibility rendering. Do we really believe that once IE 10 is out, our IE=7 will still work? If you ask me, this is a recipe for failure.

Read more on the subject on alistapart.com, for some enlightening articles on the subject.

If I could, I’d give you a special present this christmas - I’d tell you how to make IE on Windows behave like a grown-up browser. Sadly, reality sucks - as does IE on Windows - so I can only offer to share with you a couple of CSS tips to ease the pain of working with that piece of crappy software.
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I believe I owe some people a beer or two now that hell actually froze over. Believe it or not, but the current milestone of internet explorer 8 passes the unforgivable ACID2 test with full votes!

I am pretty sure that every web designer found himself stuck with one or more of Internet Explorer’s annoying bugs and usually he ended up using css hacks to isolate the problem(s). Well, I believe hacks should be used with caution, if used at all, since you never know what adverse effects it may have on your web site with future browser updates.

Fortunately IE developers provided us with a neat solution to this problem with conditional comments. Just what are conditional comments? Basically they are common html comments with an extended syntax. They are completely transparent to all non-IE browsers, so they validate and are much more future-proof than hacks will ever be.

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